The present invention relates generally to techniques for managing storage resources, and in particular to techniques for providing storage on demand management services.
The information technology revolution brings with it an ever increasing need for more storage capacity for business enterprises. It is expected that the average Fortune 1000 company's storage requirement will more than double in the coming years. In addition, growth has brought shortages of skilled persons in the information technology field. These challenges confront many companies facing the need to expand and improve their information technology assets. Increasingly, companies are turning to outsourcing storage management as a method of coping with the need to grow capacity in view of rapidly increasing demand. Storage on Demand (SoD) is one such service for providing storage management to business enterprises. By subscribing to an SoD service, companies can obtain needed storage resources by purchasing the services of the SoD service provider. Typical resources available through SoD service providers may include capacity (storage devices), I/O ports, and the like.
While certain advantages to present SoD technologies are perceived, opportunities for further improvement exist. For example, according to conventional SoD technology, storage resources located at one SoD site are unavailable for use by customer's using storage resources at another SoD site. Further, in conventional technologies, an SoD service provider must visit customer's sites to configure the customer's host computer installation to work with the SoD's storage resources. This can be a relatively time-consuming and costly process, especially in a situation where a substantial number of resources are managed. In other words, using conventional approaches, the resources of other SoD sites are unavailable to the customer who is serviced by a local SoD site that lacks capacity to fulfill the customer's requests.
What is needed are improved techniques for managing allocation of storage resources in a plurality of sites connected by a potentially widely dispersed network according to user demand.